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Transitional fossil
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==Fossil record== {{See also|Taphonomy}} Not every transitional form appears in the [[fossil record]], because the fossil record is not complete. Organisms are only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances, and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered. Paleontologist [[Donald Prothero]] noted that this is illustrated by the fact that the number of species known through the fossil record was less than 5% of the number of known living species, suggesting that the number of species known through fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived.<ref name=Prothero2007pp5053>{{harvnb|Prothero|2007|pp=50–53}}</ref> Because of the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, logic dictates that known fossils represent only a small percentage of all life-forms that ever existed—and that each discovery represents only a snapshot of evolution. The transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, which never demonstrate an exact half-way point between clearly divergent forms.<ref name="CC200">{{cite web |url=http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html |title=Claim CC200: Transitional fossils |date=5 November 2006 |editor-last=Isaak |editor-first=Mark |website=[[TalkOrigins Archive]] |publisher=The TalkOrigins Foundation, Inc. |location=Houston, TX |access-date=2009-04-30}}</ref> The fossil record is very uneven and, with few exceptions, is heavily slanted toward organisms with hard parts, leaving most groups of [[soft-bodied organism]]s with little to no fossil record.<ref name=Prothero2007pp5053/> The groups considered to have a good fossil record, including a number of transitional fossils between traditional groups, are the vertebrates, the [[echinoderm]]s, the [[brachiopod]]s and some groups of [[arthropod]]s.<ref>{{harvnb|Donovan|Paul|1998}}</ref>
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